Is the opposition back?

Francisco Tatad

FOR the first two years of President Ferdinand Marcos Jr.’s current six-year term, no sign of the political opposition existed. The common verdict was that it was dead.

Nine presidential candidates had certified that they all had lost to the son and namesake of the late Ferdinand Edralin Marcos Sr., who was ousted in a US-instigated military coup in 1986 after serving for 21 years. Marcos Jr. obtained 31.6 million votes, the biggest presidential landslide in our history.

In 2023, a citizen’s election transparency group headed by retired brigadier general Eliseo Rio Jr., a multi-awarded electronics engineer and former undersecretary for operations of the Department of Information and Communications Technology, showed that some election results were received by servers before they actually left the voting precincts. These seemed to demonstrate fraud, but they failed to influence the general perception of the public.

The previously freewheeling and not-always responsible oligarchic press grew increasingly timid even when they needed to be brave. Usually perceptive observers were quick to submit to the government’s self-serving pronouncements, regardless of the evidence. The most glaring example of this is the government’s decision to grant to the United States forces operational sites inside Philippine military bases for their declared war preparations against China.

This was in gross violation of the Constitution which expressly prohibits foreign military bases, troops or facilities in the country, unless authorized by a treaty duly concurred in by the Senate and if Congress so requires, approved by majority of the votes cast by the people in a national referendum held for that purpose. It was also a violation of the constitutional renunciation of war as an instrument of national policy and the constitutional proclamation of the Philippines as a nuclear weapons-free state.

But this patently unconstitutional act was never publicly debated — not in Congress, in any town hall or in the press. The most patriotic and sober voices who were neither anti-American nor pro-Chinese were never heard. The residual members of the opposition never raised a question about it. They blindly accepted the Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement (EDCA) with the US as a token of their support for the effort to contain the rise of China, which had become a pillar of the national security and foreign policy of the Marcos government. Some of our well-known pro-American apologists outdid themselves by defending the Philippine involvement in the US war preparations against China more stridently than some US spokesmen themselves.

And then the tsunami struck. A surreptitious plot to revise the Constitution through a highly questionable “people’s initiative” (PI) threatened to abolish the Senate as one of the pillars of the bicameral Congress. Overnight, the serene and sometimes lackadaisical 24-member Senate became a beehive of constitutional outrage. Although the Senate never openly reacted to the naked constitutional violation when EDCA allowed the US to pre-position its troops, equipment and facilities against China inside Philippine bases, the senators saw a nonnegotiable red line being crossed when Speaker Ferdinand Martin Romualdez led the House in proposing to amend the Constitution through an alleged PI that is actually a politicians’ initiative.

Apparently, the hidden plan is to ram through Congress a shift to parliamentary government by canceling the proposed 2028 presidential elections in which Vice President Sara Duterte hopes to run for president and converting the current presidential system into a parliamentary system through a manipulated three-fourths vote by all the members of Congress. Since the Constitution does not require the Senate and the House to vote as one house in order to produce this “three-fourths vote,” the House politicians mobilized their fraudulent “PI” to call for joint voting by the two houses.

For this reason, they launched an aggressive signature-gathering campaign that has provoked charges of “bribery” of citizens being asked to sign the petition for the initiative. The campaign has been exposed as a fraud, but if the House succeeds in reducing the bicameral Congress into a unicameral one, with the Senate being virtually abolished, then the shift to parliamentary government would become a fait accompli.

But Sen. Maria Josefa Imelda “Imee” Marcos, the President’s elder sister and chairman of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations and Committee on Electoral Reforms and People’s Participation, among others, decided to investigate. This became the fly in the ointment. Aside from putting Senator Marcos and the House speaker in an open collision course, from which there seems no easy way out, the investigation has produced some embarrassing results — not only for the House, but even for the President.

Some congressmen and senators have exchanged strong words in the halls of both houses and in the press. These are all close supporters of the President. But until he categorically disavows any kind of support for the PI, the Senate may have to assume the role of opposition to the President. I cannot foresee Imee Marcos openly professing full opposition to her younger brother’s government; but if he fails to take the necessary steps to correct the House’s misguided initiative, this is what we might expect.

Under the Constitution, the president has no particular role to play in amending or revising the fundamental law of the land. As clearly written in Article XVII (Amendments or Revisions), this is purely the affair of Congress and the Filipino electorate. But the careless misadventures of some of his allies have certainly created serious leadership problems that must be quickly addressed. Let it not be said that the President’s inability to act promptly and wisely on the “PI” issue has prompted the Senate to become the opposition that rose from the grave.

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